


i am tired, beloved (of chafing my heart against the want of you)

by hitlikehammers



Series: Cardiophilia Sequence [6]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Cardiophilia, Character Study, Codependency, Commitment Anxiety, Heartbeat Kink, Longing, Love, M/M, Misunderstandings, Pulsepoint Kink, Realization of Feelings, Relationship Anxiety, Romance, Vulnerability, Yes that IS love that you're feeling Sherlock Holmes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-28
Updated: 2012-09-30
Packaged: 2017-11-15 05:19:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/523584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Love is more than a vicious motivator. Love is Armageddon and the plague, and the spark of life when the world’s coming down.</i>
</p><p>In dealing with the aftermath of nearly losing the man who means <i>everything</i>, Sherlock is nothing short of terrified. And John, well—John should probably have seen this coming.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part I

**Author's Note:**

> Follows **[suddenly your heart showed me my way](http://archiveofourown.org/works/411375)** , **[the beat and beating heart](http://archiveofourown.org/works/422019/chapters/704161)** , **[your heart in the lightning (and the thunder that follows)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/446596)** , **[echoes through the caverns of a chest (the give and take)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/450331)** , and **[i'd trade your fading heart (for the flailing beats in mine)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/461462/chapters/795460)**.
> 
>  
> 
> My ongoing and most sincere thanks to [](http://speak-me-fair)[](http://speak-me-fair.livejournal.com)**speak_me_fair** for the Britpicking and beta-work, and for probably having more confidence in my style than I can properly rationalize. Credit to [Amy Lowell](http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16358) for the title.

Sherlock doesn’t sleep, he can’t; it’s not surprising, really. His patterns of existence have been fundamentally altered; his Circadian rhythms are no longer his own.

He doesn’t eat. Before, he could manage just enough, the absolute minimum required to maintain his transport; now, he feels nauseated constantly, his heart in his throat, choking—in his gut for the pull of gravity, the plummeting despair, worn away by acid and the wrench of some eternal ache, some whisper from the depths that promises impossible, ineffable: untenable truths.

And it’s a puzzle, a problem, a dilemma that by rights he should solve, could have once, but not here, not now. He can’t analyse it too closely; he cannot think on it, can’t dwell on it because it heralds devastation, holds inside it a heartbreak of an order, a magnitude that no mortal man could be expected to survive. 

And if he’s learned anything, if he’s found a truth he can no longer deny in this, it’s that he _is_ human, he is finite, and for all the unexpected depth of a muscle, of a metaphor inside his chest he is dying, nonetheless: he is frail, he is weak for the feeling and the uncoordinated flailing of every beat beneath him, within him, around him—necessary, and too distant now to know.

He wants, needs to yield and embrace that percussive sign, that echoing contraction of fibres and cells and blood where it burgeons and blossoms and rises to the surface to greet him like a calling or a prayer; he needs to know that planets spin and organs pump and blood flows; he _needs_.

But he doesn’t deserve it. He doesn’t deserve the salve; the warmth. Not now.

Not after... not _after_ —

He blinks, and stares out over the fog, over the water that he knows, that he can recite the composition of on any given morning, its alkalinity, its microbial content; he can feel it on his skin if he merely breathes deep enough to close the distance and make it near, intimate—a coolness, a resonating slip that never lingers, only flows, and Sherlock knows that that’s what awaits him, rightfully, knows that it's all he can possess, all that can encompass his confines and cover his voids: the opposite, the wretched, the frozen, not John, _not John_ —

He hugs himself tight against a chill that was made for him, that’s fitted to the weft of his skeleton alone; he shivers. 

How had it progressed so far? However had this feeling, this attachment, this ever-wretched _sentiment_ : how on earth did it manage to pierce so deep?

How had it embedded so that every sluggish, faltering spasm of wet, wasted flesh merely strikes harder, yearns larger, longer—flays and strangles and yet clings, holds the whole of it ever more dear, sympathetic; devoted to the demon that bleeds it dry; some half-hearted Stockholm Syndrome that sings, wrenches with each breath except it patches the puncture marks, keeps his lungs inflated from the first—and this is agony, he realises; this is what it feels like to live through dying, to take all the limbs for the sake of a heart that can’t pump, can’t beat into nothing, a catch twenty-two and a mirror-masque and a benediction promising Hell alone. 

Not his area, he’d said it once. Not his area, and if only he’d know just how much, how far beyond his purview this stretched, this reached: how deep against the shallow streams it flooded and filled, how much it sought to decimate and sculpt him anew, and fuck, but how was it possible, where did it come from? Did the Earth; do the Heavenly Bodies feel like this? 

Is the deeper reason, the honest truth as to why they never touch, is it more than the force of gravity, more than geodesics and the risk of incineration—what little life remains within this universe, is the sum of it only just the ashes, just the husks left once the lover’s been burned, inside out or outside in and is there even a difference, does it matter at all when already he is splayed wide: the open wound of his organs, the weeping core of him gaping, open to the world, to oxygen and sodium and light in all the dark except no, he’s turned from his Sun, he’s wandered too far and it’s cold, and he hurts, and is it worse, really, to burn than to freeze—

He gasps, his lungs stretching, creaking for the way he forces them to choke down air, a breeze that’s dry and damp together, a paradox, like living and dying and the eye of some radiant hurricane in the heavens come to tear him asunder.

 _If only_.

He gasps, and he wills his fingers to still as he lights the cigarette and pretends, for an instant, that he is Before, and that illumination, that the conduction of light is a scientific inevitability, that it means nothing—that it doesn’t squeeze against his ribs, each bone in a fist of its own, fracturing miraculous, almost relieved at the promise of a respite, of a breaking point that means they’ll not have to hold against the fray any longer. 

Won’t have to fight a battle no one ever hoped to win.

Sherlock’s heart races as he inhales, takes an uneven, unpracticed drag and fights the irritation, the rebellion of his lungs because this is foreign, this is Before just like every other simple, wretched, wanting thing he knows and is, but the nicotine had only ever calmed him, then. It had only ever made him feel light and slow, sharpened things for the way they stalled.

Now, though, the drumbeat is deafening in his ears. Now, he can’t see straight for the thickness of every breath, every harsh suck of air balanced wrong, apportioned senselessly, needlessly, because Sherlock doesn’t need air, Sherlock doesn’t need space or light or matter or form, what he needs is a single conglomeration, one unique amalgam of molecules in perfect synchrony, one living breathing being wrapped in sun-kissed skin and thick wool and a mouth that fits his own like the torn halves of newsprint, delicate and precise in the empty space, the fringe where a word is lost but a new story knits together. He needs eyes so blue he has to blink twice. He needs a touch so warm it sends him reeling. 

He needs a heart so strong and steady, so willing to pound and press and hold; he needs a beat so bold and brilliant that he doesn’t recognise the world, cannot pick apart himself without its presence, without the way it conducts his very respiration, the pithy pump of every millilitre of blood in his body; the way it strokes and saves his very soul.

He drops his cigarette into the Thames, accidental; his wrists are shaking too goddamned hard to hold.

His wrists are shaking, and the drumbeat in his own ears, now, is taunting him; his fingertips sing with the need to touch, his lips and tongue with a heart’s-ache to savour and the heel of his boot is scraping, digging at the pavement in the dark as he goes to turn, intrinsic, thoughtless, driven by the depths in him he’d never plumbed and now cannot escape, and it’s John, it’s always been John: John is the heart and sees the heart and holds the heart and dwells _in_ the heart and Sherlock needs, he needs, he—

But then he hears it, feels it: phantom limbs and the world crashing around him. Then he knows it right beside him, as if it never left: the trashing and the slowing, the stumbling and the fall. He has never known pain like that, fear like that, and for all that he requires data, for all that he needs to _know_ he’d have happily died an ignorant man to never have known what John Watson’s heart felt like as it stopped.

He trembles, chokes as his own heart jumps back to being, except his heart has long been lost, cradled in another chest and then it ceased, then it died, and if it started against by some miracle, some impossible prayer, then he, himself, stayed greying, riddled with decay.

Ah. So this is what kills a man. It makes sense. It all makes so much sense.

He feels ill.

Sherlock’s eyes slide closed, wet beneath the lashes, just at the space where the shadows are growing, cast wide below the socket, periorbital bruises in the dark and his heart is still thrumming because it does now, always; it shivers, fibrillates without any sense of time or restraint, desperately yearning, _dying_ , to wear itself down, to wear itself _out_ , to bid farewell to the promise of mourning and its lingering chill where it touches the scapulae, brushes the back of his neck. 

He breathes out, long, a sigh and a wish, all leftover smoke and condensation on the air as the muscle at his centre pummels, pushes hard at awkward, anxious intervals: the first pass of air from his lips, the twist of his wrist, the clench of his teeth down on the tip of his tongue and the first bead of blood between the spaces in his teeth; the flex of his fingertips as he shudders, swallows a sob because there is a distance he has to maintain to survive, and yet the distance is what’s killing him sooner, rather than later. The distance is what’s stringing him out like a junkie, like he used to be, and draining him more thoroughly than he’d believed he could be bled.

And that, perhaps, is the reality of it. That’s the horror he let himself in for when his fingers felt that pulse by chance, and his mind turned luminous, his chest went warm.

Because love is more than a vicious motivator. Love is Armageddon and the plague, and the spark of life when the world’s coming down.

Love is his heart in a vice and wrapped up in feathers, pierced with the daggers and lodged deep as Excalibur yet kissed, caressed gentle and true and Sherlock hurts for it, he hurts because love is perpetual dying, love is the end of beginnings; love is immortality unbidden, a repudiation of death, and love is sickness in the marrow of him, deep in his bones and oh, oh—his chest is too light, too small to contain all of this; his heart too full and swollen from its wounds, all at once.

He needs John. He needs all that John is, all that John means. He needs _John_ in order to stop the slow descent, the gripping reaper at his back.

But John’s face still has that pallor, when Sherlock looks at it. John’s chest doesn’t rise and fall, when Sherlock watches. John’s eyes are wide and glassy, lifeless, even as he stares at Sherlock with all the care, the concern, the affection Sherlock wants to feel, needs to absorb and believe in, now that he knows what it is, where it fits and how it corresponds with the hollow where John’s heart slides and stays and stands unfailing against his own, where they meld and mesh and hold.

John’s pulse, should Sherlock feel for it now—he cannot imagine it as anything but stillness and cold, cannot bear to remember how it was before it stopped, before _Sherlock_ stopped and the poles of the planet shifted places and Sherlock’s equilibrium was shattered, rendered folly. 

And for all that he craves it, requires it, needs it to function like oxygen in the lungs and the blood and brain, he is not equipped to shoulder the risk. 

He is not _equipped_.

Logic tells him that John is real. Reason tells him that even as he is, even as he’s always been, the human body has its limits and he’s testing them. He will not last long, not like this, not on this ledge, unbalanced, unmoored. All he needs is to reach, to feel it, to remember the rhythm and reclaim the beat in John as his only complement, his conductor and his strings, his rosin and bow and the blink of his eyes as he measures time in his bones. All he needs to do is touch and John will pull him back to safety, to solid ground: will pull him close and Sherlock will fall into heat and a heart he knows, he _loves_ , that stopped and restarted because Sherlock was clever, even if he wasn’t enough to keep it pumping, present, _here_.

Logic tells him many things. And yet his own heart raps out a tattoo unending, unrelenting, wild and unsustainable and his chest hurts now, aches always.

Sherlock needs John. Sherlock doesn’t have a death wish.

But he cannot touch the man who holds him, who commands the whole of him, and find nothing; he cannot brush against flesh and find the life there to be no more than an illusion. He _can’t_.

Not _again_.

He stays on the bridge until sunrise; until John’s left the flat for the day.


	2. Part II

There are two steaming cups of tea on the table at his side, pressing wet rings into yesterday’s paper, bleeding the colours, smearing the ink. John spends far too many minutes staring at them, breathing in the scent of them, watching as the heat seeps out, as the warmth dies, as the tendrils of steam start to lose height, fervour; as they claw at something crucial but miss and sink back, shrivelled. He feels for them, somehow: an ache in his gut that burns toward his chest, that can’t be the same thing it has been, always would be—can’t be the same despair, the same longing that’s been eating at him for well over a month.

Because, to be fair, John was well aware that this was coming.

He knew that getting involved with Sherlock would be unbalanced, one-sided. He’d been well aware of his own self, his own heart: he’d known where he stood and he’d recognised the vantage point for what it was—unrequited, but stubborn, dug in deep and going nowhere, not any time soon. He’d adjusted to it, the permanent lump in his throat, the buzz in his ears: he’d adapted and compensated for the lean of it, the weight in his actions, his motions, his breath. He’d managed.

And then Sherlock came to the pool, where his eyes grew wide and his pulse pushed out from the long column of his neck and the buttons on his shirt strained for the ways his lungs were working too hard, too fast. Then they’d survived, somehow, and Sherlock changed, the world shifted. There’d been that day at the warehouse, and that evening with the violin and then it didn’t matter how much John sought out equilibrium, how much he knew which way to shift. 

It didn’t matter, because the earth _itself_ had shifted. Something fundamental was spinning, shaking without pause and John could barely keep his feet on the ground, barely even saved the will to try.

Even then, though: even then, he knew the fascination would have to cease, would hold tight and blinding, would constitute whirlwinds and explosions and would leave him decimated in the aftermath, and he’d known that, he’d known there’d _be_ an aftermath because whirlwinds lose momentum and the air stops feeding the flames after a time: he’d known forever was out of the question, with Sherlock, and yet when he’d seen those eyes, and he’d heard those words and his heart had sung in a cadence, in some otherworldly harmony with that mad-rapid beat, he’d assented. Knowingly. Wilfully.

He’d ignored the inevitability of the day it would die.

And now it’s been six weeks. Six weeks and five days, to be exact; six weeks and five days’ worth of mornings where the far mug has gone untouched, grown cold, because it doesn’t have an owner, a pair of lips to fit around and drink. 

The second mug, closer at hand: that one’s gone cold because John feels ill at the sight, what it means. He feels sick in his stomach and his throat and his chest and he can’t bring himself to take so much as a sip. Even the scent makes him just this side of nauseated.

He can’t stop making tea.

John presses his lips together, firmly, puts the heels of his palms to the hollows of his eyes and breathes in heavily, tries to clear something he can’t name from the palette of his very being and fails, always fails: just smears it around and feels that much more covered, weighted. Feels that much more uneasy; alone.

He should be flattered, he thinks, that Sherlock came to the hospital at all.

The hospital. That’s where it started, really; when _this_ started, their decline: rapid, and somehow still agonisingly slow. His mind was a bit hazy then, just this side of drug-laden, the poison and its antidote still sifting through his veins; he doesn’t remember all of it with clarity. 

He knows enough of the after, though. He has enough practice in reading between the lines.

He recalls waking on his own, at first: the sterile burn in his nostrils as he drifted in and out of real consciousness, as awareness eluded him for a spell and he dreamt impossible things, things like Sherlock’s eyes growing wide and his breath coming too fast. He dreams of gravel at his nape and lips on his neck, clinical but pleading; Sherlock’s head on his chest as he gasps; the fabric of John’s shirt damp where Sherlock pressed in, close, listened and measured and cried, no, that’s not it, that’s his mind playing tricks and the lingering effects of that fucking injection; Sherlock and tears, really, _no_ ; Christ, how _absurd_ —

John recalls the moments that did make sense, though, recalls the sensation of being distinctly bereft, recalls knowing what broken ribs feel like and recognising that what’s stinging in his chest is something different, remembers being unable to reconcile the fact that someone had pressed, pushed, pumped his heart so desperately as to crack bones and bruise in fingertip-patterns with the fact that no one was seated at his bedside, the fact that no one stepped in— _swept_ in—when he managed to stay awake for more than a few moments in a row. He remembers, before the atmosphere had shifted to accommodate the presence, before his chest expanded of its own accord and loosened, limp with a relief that made no sense but never had to, never would when eyes found his and the billowing of his coat moved the stale air about and hit John’s chest dead in its centre for the motion, the swift pause before John spoke, still a touch dazed, but sharpened now, alert: oddly content. Comforted.

 _Sherlock_.

John remembers stretching, then, remembers reaching; he remembers seeing Sherlock recoil in the barest of instants and feeling dizzy, faint before Sherlock’s fingers wrapped about him, before Sherlock clung like the dying to his arms and shook below noticing, pressed his thumbs tight enough to bruise for all that he looked broken. John had relished it, the passion in that touch because Sherlock’s eyes had been fraying, bloodshot, and his voice had been hoarse and frantic in a way that bore only ill, but John had been willing to believe in the way that Sherlock clutched to him, he’d been willing to take that, had been willing to beg it to overcome the plunge in his gut when Sherlock’s eyes hardened, when Sherlock’s hands loosened, when they were home and Sherlock didn’t speak, stayed away, maintained a distance that had never existed between them in place. Fuck, but they’d been closer in the lab at Barts, the day the met.

John had been willing to ignore the signs, in the moment. He’d been willing to relish touch and presence and heat and the way he knew, then, in a way that transcended intellect, that overtook the simple act of being informed: he knew, in Sherlock’s grasp, that the handprints left in mottled greens and greys on his torso would fit Sherlock’s elegant fingers, the particular width of the splay between knuckles: he knows his heart is beating now because of Sherlock Holmes, and he thinks to himself—because he wants to, because they almost lost this but again, once again they were here, _breathing_ ; he thinks to himself that it’s about damn time the literal truth matched the one he’d been carrying, questioning, shying from for all that it boiled in his blood.

Fuck, but John’s fallen harder than he knows how to bounce back from; than he suspects he’ll ever learn. He’s ascended heights in this that burn from his marrow out, that make it hard to breathe and he can’t for the life of him regret it.

He can’t deny that it hurts like hell, though, even if he’d seen it coming, even if he’d turned of his own volition, his own muscles and bones. 

The fact that Sherlock hasn’t touched him, hasn’t come close enough to feel his warmth;—it makes him feel far too like the long days, the worst days of the war when the heat made him shiver for the sweat running down his back; the way his stomach lurched for having nothing in it, for all the rations and the water he couldn’t bring himself to take.

The fact that Sherlock barely sees him, hardly allows himself to be seen in John presence, a spectre in their home—the fact that it happens despite no evidence of cases, for all that John knows Greg’s been swamped; the fact that there’s no erratic wail of the violin; no toes in the breadbox; the fact is that it frightens him. It frightens him, and sends a sickness through his chest that churns when he breathes, when he feeds it with oxygen, when his heart beats it around without relent.

It’s _normalcy_ , and it makes John ill in his gut, makes something twist beneath the ribs, breeding a sensation that’s entirely new, that reminds him of spilling intestines and blood when it gushes where it’s not meant to be and the oesophagus curling and crushing around the lungs and the heart alike and squeezing, pressure placed until they burst: a mess. He’s a mess, and they made their own normalcy, didn’t they, a normal that was absolute madness and the fit of their bodies together and the way that Sherlock sucked at his pulse and memorised his heartbeat and he hadn’t even flinched. And Sherlock would know now, wouldn’t he, he’d listen to John’s heart as it squeezes and contorts and he’d know what was wrong in an instant, he’d hold the only cure for it except he doesn’t care, and John’s in a right fucking state, all sentiment, and this is why Sherlock dismissed feeling, this is why it could never last, this is why John should never have given in and could never have held out against it because for all that he wants Sherlock to _feel_ , John’s afraid that he feels more than enough for them both.

It’s all such a _mess_.

John notices, suddenly, the way that steam from the tea in front of him has stopped rising, ignores the clench in his stomach, the nausea; he shouldn’t be surprised by the hollowness, the way he feels _everything_ but most keenly, it’s the emptiness that bites.

He wants Sherlock looking at him, studying him, counting the beats of his heart in his crazed and careful precision, in fascination like an innocent and a soul older than time all at once; like a man who holds him close because he needs it, needs proximity and exactitude but also needs _John_ , needs to feel him and keep him close and still and present and never-ending, because John deluded himself, all right? Yes. He’d believed they were something, believed they were timeless and rooted and obscene perfection like torn skin stitched together too tight, the only way it can.

John imagined they were something greater. John had thought... John had believed that he’d been special. That he’d broken the rules and changes the course and was someone enough to snag an enigma for now, but also for always.

A part of him, however small but bright, had _believed_ , and had thought about one day learning Sherlock’s heart just as close, just as dear and unfailing, just as frantic and steady and shaking and certain. 

John had known the truth and had cast it aside in exchange for a fool’s hope. Aptly called, that.

John knew that this was coming.

John knows they’ve run out of tea. He’s not sure if it matters, it he’s even meant to buy more. Perhaps he’s pretended, perhaps he’s tried to put off the inevitable for just a little bit too long. 

It’s been six weeks and five days. Maybe that’s how long it takes, in the end. Six weeks and five days to let the dream die.

John sighs, and listens to his bones creak, his heart pumping languid, mournful, resigned when he stands and shrugs into his jacket; descends the stairs.

Ignores the tightness in his chest as the door slips shut.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise, all this angst will be resolved very soon.


End file.
